DO WE EXALT THE CHURCH ABOVE CHRIST?
(Or Is It Our Sect?)

I recently visited a Church of Christ sister in the hospital and there was something about our conversation that disturbed me. Since she was making a good recovery from her illness she was free to talk, and I encouraged her to tell me about her life. It turned out that she has been a tireless worker, along with her late husband, in helping to start new congregations, especially in the northern states which have long been considered Church of Christ mission fields. I came to admire her for her sacrifices for the Lord and for her work’s sake. She is obviously a good and intelligent woman.

In telling me about her husband she said, “He didn’t know the church when I first met him.” Later in the conversation when she was explaining the conversion of her husband she said, “He had never heard of the Church of Christ when we met,” and she went on to explain how she brought him to a knowledge of the truth. That was easy enough for me to believe, for I found her a persuasive woman.

As we talked on about her spiritual pilgrimage I was disturbed by the fact that so little had been said about Jesus Christ. Her life had been given over to the work of the church. She had tirelessly labored in building up the church, sometimes from the ground up, and in difficult places. She had succeeded in converting her husband to the church. All this is of course the Church of Christ. I noticed such language as, “He came to know the church,” and “We were always faithful to the church.”

While it was hardly the time to challenge the dear woman, I wondered where Christ was in all this. While I am confident she would say, if! had questioned her, that Jesus Christ is the basis of it all, I was smitten by her church-oriented thinking. I found myself blaming our System rather than her. “My God,” I said to myself as I left her hospital room, “what have we done to our people?”

Chances arc if I had been talking to a Baptist, a Pentecostal, or even a devout Methodist, the words would have been different, such as, “I was at last able to lead my husband to the Lord,” or “When we first met he did not know Jesus.”

Church of Christ folk are more like the Mormons. All they can talk about is “the true church” or “the restored church,” and everything is measured by one’s relationship to the Mormon church. I hate to say it, but we are not much better. We just have a different view of which sect is the true church!

While our Church of Christ sister did not elaborate, it could have been that her husband-to-be did indeed know the Lord when they first met, but that would not have mattered. It was her task to convert him to the right church.

The fallacy in all this is that we, like the Mormons, equate what we call ‘The Church of Christ” with the Body of Christ revealed in Scripture. We can with the apostles refer to “Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32) in exalted terms, but we are being sectarian when we make our own religious group (a euphemism for denomination!) the whole of that church. We are perpetuating partyism when we suppose that the Body of Christ in Denton, Texas is restricted to those that we call “The Church of Christ.” Christ’s church in any city is made up of all those who faithfully follow Jesus Christ. The true church is where the Spirit of Christ is.

We can reasonably insist that the true church of Jesus Christ is not anyone of the denominations nor all of them combined. It is rather made up of all those who are “in Christ” wherever they may be. If there are true Christians among the Baptists and Presbyterians, and surely there must be, it is because they have believed and been baptized into Christ, not because they are Baptists or Presbyterians. So with those in the Church of Christ. Church of Christ ism does not make Christians - only following Jesus Christ does that. So, when we say there are “Christians in the sects,” as our people have conceded since the days of Campbell and Stone, we mean that they are “in Christ” in spite of being in a sect, whether Church of Christ, Presbyterian, or Baptist. And they are the true church wherever they are.

Our leaders in the Stone-Campbell Movement have also always insisted that there should be no denominations. Their existence stands as an obstruction to the church of Christ uniting. Churches should cease being denominations, which of course includes the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and then there will be only the Body of Christ. Thank God, that will one day be realized.

Paul tells us who the true Christians are in 2 Tim. 2:19. “The firm foundation of God stands,” he says as he encourages young Timothy amidst perilous times, and he is talking about the church. He goes on to say that it is marked with God’s seal, which identifies it as his own. The seal is, “The Lord knows those that are his, and let everyone who has named the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.” It is clear enough: The true church, the firm foundation of God, is made up of those whom the. Lord knows to be his own.

The true Christians are those whom the Lord claims to be his own, souls who have turned from sin and are living Godly lives. The Lord knows each one by name. We don’t. He knows who his true church is. We don’t. But we can have a good idea. When we see people who believe and act as if they know Jesus and are known by him, and who are living accordingly, we can accept them as equals in Christ and as members of the Body of Christ. But still we never really know for sure, for the true church has God’s seal stamped upon it, and that seal says it is God that knows those that are his. Nobody else can make that judgment, not even editors! —the Editor